15

Feb

We are happy to announce that Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now provides you the ability to setup Disaster Recovery (DR) for IaaS VMs usingmanaged disks. With this feature, ASR fulfills an important requirement to become an all-encompassing DR solution for all of your production applications hosted on laaS VMs in Azure, including applications hosted on VMs with managed disks.

Managed disks provide several advantages including simplification of storage management and guaranteeing industry-leading durability and availability for disk storage.

When you protect virtual machines on managed disks, Azure Site Recovery creates a replica managed disk in the target region corresponding to each managed disk of your production VM in the primary region. This replica disk acts as the data store for the source disk in the primary region, thus eliminating the need to create and manage multiple storage accounts in the target region to store data for your protected machines.

Let us look at an example of protecting a virtual machine with five managed disks. As shown below in Fig 1 and Fig 2,

You can enable protection for the Virtual machine via the virtual machine experience or through the recovery services vault experience.If you plan to use the virtual

13

Feb

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of application consistent backup for Linux VMs running in Azure using Azure Backup. We did a preview of this feature last year and customers are already using this framework for various applications like Oracle, MySQL, Mongo DB, SAP HANA, and PostGreSQL.

What is application consistent backup?

Application consistent backup ensures that the backed-up data is transactionally consistent, and that applications will boot up post VM restore. To ensure transactional consistency, applications need to be quiesced and there should be no unfinished transactions when taking a VM snapshot.

Windows has the Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) framework to ensure application consistent VM backup, but there is no such generic framework for Linux. With greater adoption of Azure Linux VMs, there is an increasing demand to backup critical enterprise applications running inside Azure VMs. We introduced a VSS-like generic framework for ensuring application consistent VM backup for Linux applications running on any Linux distribution. This framework gives you the flexibility to execute custom pre and post scripts as part of the VM backup process. These scripts can be used to quiesce application IOs while taking a VM snapshot that guarantees application consistency.

12

Feb

We are very happy to announce the general availability of geo-replication support for Azure Redis Cache. Redis Cache is Microsoft Azure’s Cache-as-a-Service offering, based on the popular open source Redis in-memory key-value store. With geo-replication support, Redis Cache joins a growing list of Azure services that enable developers and IT pros to build disaster recovery plans. This ensures the availability of mission-critical applications running on our cloud, even in the unlikely event of a widespread regional failure. In fact, customers can already design disaster resilient solutions on Azure, using Virtual Machines with Azure Site Recovery, Traffic Manager, and data services such as Cosmos DB, SQL Database, and now Redis Cache.

While announcing the general availability of geo-replication for Redis Cache, we would also like to take the opportunity to express our gratitude to everyone who has participated in the public preview. Your feedback has been invaluable to us and helped validate our implementation. Thank you!

Setting up geo-replication in Redis Cache

Geo-replication is a feature of the premium tier of Azure Redis Cache. You need a pair of premium cache instances before you can use geo-replication. If you already have a premium cache, you just need to add another one

08

Feb

We previously announced the preview of Azure Backup reporting and gave customers the ability to generate their own reports and build customizations using Power BI. Today, we are pleased to let you know that you can leverage the same workflow to build your own Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) monitoring solution for Azure Backup in the upgraded OMS workspace. The OMS monitoring solution allows you to monitor key backup parameters such as backup and restore jobs, backup alerts, and cloud storage usage across Recovery Services vaults and subscriptions. You can then utilize OMS log analytics capabilities to raise further alerts for events that you deem important for the business to be notified of. You could even open tickets through webhooks or ITSM integration using the OMS log analytics capabilities.

Here’s how you do it…

Configuring Diagnostic settings

You can open the diagnostic setting window from the Azure Recovery services vault, or you can open the diagnostic setting window by logging into Azure portal. First, click “Monitor” service followed by “Diagnostic settings” in settings section. You can then specify the relevant Subscription, Resource Group, and Recovery Services Vault. In the Diagnostic settings window, as shown below, you can select “Send data

07

Feb

Microsoft becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to offer SAP HANA supportable VMs in the UK.

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) customers can now take advantage of the Azure M/V3/B-series of VM sizes available in the UK South region. We’re also excited to announce that Azure is the first hyperscale cloud provider to offer VMs optimized for large in-memory workloads such as SAP HANA in the UK.

New Azure M series – The Azure M-series is perfectly suited for your large in-memory workloads like SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton. With the M-series, these databases can load large datasets into memory and utilize fast memory access with massive virtual CPU (vCPU) parallel processing to speed up queries and enable real-time analytics.

New Azure B series – B-series VMs provide the lowest cost option for customers with flexible vCPU requirements. These are useful for workloads like web servers, small databases, and development or test environments where CPU utilization is low most of the time, but spikes for

07

Feb

Today we are happy to announce performance upgrades to all paid service tiers in Azure Search. For the exact same price, these upgraded Azure Search services have roughly double the compute power of the previous hardware configuration that backed Azure Search. Additionally, services in the Standard tier began using SSD storage under the hood, compared to HDD storage used previously.

What does this mean for Azure Search?

With these service upgrades, we removed the document count limits from the Basic and Standard pricing tiers. This means that only storage limits are enforced in new Azure Search services. Depending on a scenario’s workload, these upgraded services may also benefit from faster indexing and querying performance at the same exact price points.

The Basic tier now supports an increase in the number of indexes from 5 to 15. Also in the Basic tier, Azure Search can now support up to 15 data sources and indexers per service. For the Standard 3 High Density pricing tier (great for multitenant scenarios), we were able to remove the 200 million document per partition limit, only enforcing per-index limits.

02

Feb

In December we announced the release of ARM APIs for usage details. We continue that transformation to ARM APIs with this release of the Marketplace charges API for Enterprise and Web Direct customers with a few exceptions documented in the limitations and a Price Sheet API for Enterprise customers.

The updated ARM API offers the benefits of:

Migrating from a key based authorization model to ARM based authentication. Resulting in an improved security posture and the ability to utilize ARM RBAC for authorization. Adding support for Web Direct subscriptions, with a few exceptions documented below. Limitations on subscriptions

The following subscription types are currently not supported with the Marketplace Charges API:

Customers who are heavy users of our APIs have requested a new data indicator. This helps them avoid polling the API and getting a full response back that has not changed since the last call. To address this request, we are releasing an updated version of the legacy usage details API that will use E-Tags to let callers know when data has been refreshed. Each call to the API will return an E-Tag, in subsequent calls to the

Like the previous version, this offer allows customers to run a Jenkins master on a Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) VM in Azure. The price is the cost of running the software components and Azure infrastructure deployed by the solution template. If you are looking to run Jenkins in the cloud, you will have full control over the Jenkins master you set up.

So why are we so excited about this refresh? Because now you can go from zero to hero. Just set up the server with the configurations you need and start building in the least amount of time.

Some highlights:

Virtual network: We added support for VNET so that you can provision Jenkins in your own virtual network/subnet.

31

Jan

We heard from several customers that you need a way to view your Azure Security Center alerts in your SIEM solution for a centralized view of your security posture across your organization. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of a new feature called SIEM Export that allows you to export Azure Security Center alerts into popular SIEM solutions such as Splunk and IBM QRadar. We are continuing to invest in the number of partners we support. This feature is part of our on-going commitment to provide unified security management and protection for your cloud and on-premises workloads.

Security Center uses a variety of detection capabilities to alert you of potential threats to your environment. The alerts can tell you what triggered the alert, what in your environment was targeted, the source of the attack, and if necessary, remediation steps. You also have the flexibility to set up custom alerts to address specific needs in your environment.

Now you can take these alerts from Security Center and integrate them into your own SIEM solutions, so you can quickly view what needs your attention from one management place and take action.